


The Land of Cotton

by Whreflections



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Farmboy Will AU, Implied/Referenced Minor Character Death, M/M, Nightmares, Post Muskrat Farm AU, Will Drinks Too Much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 09:48:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12838611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: After letting Hannibal walk away from Wolf Trap in the aftermath of Muskrat Farm, Will doesn't move north, doesn't marry.  He goes south, and builds around him a cocoon of memories that he knows Hannibal can reach right through and pull him from, if he wants to.  If Hannibal ever comes for him at all.





	The Land of Cotton

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HapticLacuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapticLacuna/gifts).



> So I've been meaning to post this for...a little over a month lol 
> 
> I'll say more about this when the next chapter of AATAT posts (and it will be, as soon as I can), but there was a death in the family and things have been really rough. I've had a hard time writing and just. A hard time in general. Thanks for being awesome and understanding, guys <3 
> 
> /This/, though, was written for my friend HapticLacuna, one of the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure to know...and who I hope to be writing presents for for the rest of my life. Happy second anniversary, Katie, :) (aka, why this fic is partially about cotton XD)

If anyone had asked, Will couldn’t have begun to tell them why in the hell he planted the cotton.  It was a good thing, really, that there was no one around to ask—these days, Will did everything he could to refrain from asking questions even of himself. 

It wasn’t out in the fields proper, just a patch behind the house.  Roughly 15 by 15, almost where his momma’s vegetable garden had been.  Not the crops they sold, just the ones she kept all to herself, like the squash she grew from a strain perfected by her great grandmother.  Her ancestor had brought the seeds here from Texas, stitched into the sleeve of her dress because she didn’t trust to put them anywhere else. 

Since he’d come back here, he hadn’t dreamed of her as often as he’d been afraid he would, and when he did she was mostly just trying to beckon him to the table to talk, like he was a boy again peering out the door in the middle of the night to see her up sitting by her candle, reading and reading. 

The blood dripping down to the table from the wound on her stomach that had killed her ruined the veneer of normalcy of the dreams, though, and he woke from them every time sick with guilt because he never went to her, not once.  She beckoned, and he closed the door to hide the wound from his eyes, his heart pounding, fingers clawing at his ears so he wouldn’t hear the wet sound of organs slipping from the tear in her belly as she got up to move toward the door. 

_Will?  Will, come on now, baby, open the door.  I know you’re up.  Did you have a bad dream?  Come on out and we’ll talk about it._

Blood seeps under the door, and he wakes up with it on his hands, always. 

When he smacks the light on, he can’t see it, of course he can’t see it, but he knows it’s there.  Red, and wet, like it was on Hannibal’s hands at Muskrat Farm, like it was on Will’s in the kitchen in Minnesota. 

The dogs have mostly gotten tired of reacting to the light, but Buster woofs every time, soft and low, and Winston usually picks up his head, shuffles over until some part of him touches Will’s bed and lays back down again. 

Sometimes, Will lays back down, too,  and sleeps with the lights on.  Others, he gets up and goes to the kitchen and follows partway in the footsteps momma would have made getting him a glass of milk and cornbread.  He gets whiskey instead. 

He takes the whiskey, and goes out onto the porch, and sips, and waits.  The world moves around him in the dark in a way that it didn’t even back in Wolf Trap.  Arkansas summer nights are alive, and he rocks his chair and listens and looks up at stars too numerous to count, so numerous he’d forgotten how many there were. 

In Lithuania, he was reminded.  The sky looked like this there, over Lecter Castle, shining down on graves and gates and the entrance to a room that now housed a gift likely to go forever unseen.   If he closes his eyes, the rustling of small things out in the yard can become the slick and subtle clinking of snail shells knocking together as they traverse glass and bone, gleaning, leaving behind a surface that gleams with the proof of their passage. 

If asked, Will wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone what he waited for, on those nights, but he knows.  He knows, down to his bones.  He keeps a knife taped beneath the rocking chair for the same reason, but he doesn’t expect to ever use it.  He doesn’t expect to have it used on him, either, but he also didn’t anticipate the scar he now bears at his hairline, or how it might feel to half wake up with the snow beneath him and stars overhead, Hannibal’s arms around him and the fleeting thought passing through his head down past heart that he was in that moment as safe as he had ever been, safer than a boat on the sea. 

He waits in the summer, and the fall.  The chill of winter, and the stirring of spring.  He has waited, and waited, and doesn’t pretend to tell himself that a point will come when it will end.  He will be here to the end of his days in this place, an ever changing carousel of dogs around him, a world outside this realm he’s made for himself that blurs further and further the more time he spends out of it.  He’s not sorry; he doesn’t want it.  He never really did. 

He’ll die here, maybe on this porch, and the dogs will eat him, or the raccoons will.  Flies, and vultures.  The thoughts don’t frighten him.  There’s an odd sort of peace to be had in the thought that something of him will be consumed, that he will finally be tethered to the world in a way that isn’t abstract, that doesn’t pull at his soul but instead binds to something physical, something concrete. 

Or….or. 

Or. 

He doesn’t give much thought to what might happen if his waiting stops.  Like the reason behind his cotton, it isn’t worth considering.  It’ll happen, or it won’t.  The cotton will grow, and he’ll pick it to settle his mind, and the bleeding of his fingers and ache in his back will help, or it won’t. 

These outcomes are wholly outside of Will’s control. 

The dream comes on a night in the middle of August, and he takes his whiskey, and brings himself out to the porch.  It isn’t his usual; they were selling Fireball cheap down at the liquor store, a case with damaged labels.  He drinks, and tries not to make too much of a face at the strength of the cinnamon, then decides that it doesn’t matter.  No one is watching.  No one sees.  The night is black as pitch, and the cicadas calling out in the trees want only to fuck and die and don’t give a single goddamn about a broken man on his porch, drinking whiskey he hates because it cost him less to get it and his habit is getting expensive. 

When he appears, it isn’t out of the darkness.  Will had imagined that, a few times, only to promptly pretend he never had.  There is none of the expected subtlety in this, no creeping around the corner of the house with the stealth of a cat to settle onto the porch railing like he owns the house, like he’s been there all along. 

If Will were going to examine it, he would admit to no one but the dogs, perhaps, that he knows why he’s seen it like this.  He knows what he is—the creature that was whispered to in its own strange cocoon, molded by hands that do and don’t own him.  The house is Hannibal’s because Will is Hannibal’s.  The cotton is Hannibal’s, the whiskey, the stars.  So long as they’re both in the world and Will’s looking out at it through his own eyes, everything is Hannibal’s, and Hannibal is…

Not his, surely not, or he’d have come by now.  Not his, or he’d let it be, and never come and all.

Will’s not sure which he wants to be true, or if either is. 

None of it matters, though, when Will sees him.

Dawn is coming; the air is grey with it.  It’s the hour when the world looks as if it’s being viewed through a film, like your own hands are almost fuzzy around the edges.  He steps into the cotton and walks through it, fingers trailing the flowers like he must first nourish himself with something Will has touched, like he has come this far only to stop and drink before his body can bear him any further. 

In a way, it’s fitting—a ravenous man, in a patch of ravenous plants that Will has given and given to over the heat of the summer, pouring and pouring to provide for their desperate thirst while he pants for air, the old wound in his belly vying almost as hard for his attention as the pull in his shoulder. 

He could have withheld the water and let them die but he doesn’t, he never does, and he wonders what that says about the kind of man that he is.  Wonders, and knows. 

He leaves the Fireball and meets Hannibal at the edge of the cotton.  The knife is still under the rocking chair. 

He is thin, too thin, with stubble on his cheeks and hair grown long, dyed brown, tied back into a ponytail that manages to look artful.  He would arch his eyebrows at other men who went out like this, but Hannibal…Hannibal pulls it off, even in jeans, even in faded brown leather.  Somewhere down the road or in the woods, there will be a bike he rode here- the leather is impractical for the season otherwise.  He files it away to tell Jack, and knows he won’t. 

Will crosses his arms over his chest.  If he doesn’t, he’ll do something with them he might wish he hadn’t.  Whether that’s flinging his hands around Hannibal’s neck and driving him down to the ground, or doing the same and kissing him, he’s really not sure. 

Hannibal watches him with his head slightly downturned, his eyes warm.  The ache in him is so palpable, for a moment Will sees the burst of antlers leaving his chest, turning to hands, reaching, and reaching, the distance between them stretching out until it is infinite, until the space before they touch becomes infinitesimal, and still present. 

“Are you going to ask me to leave again?” Will says, breaking a silence that did not feel as fragile as it should.  Not that he asked before, not really, not in such direct words.  Will’s throat hurts, and he wonders if it moves differently when he talks to another person and not a dog, or if the pain is Hannibal. 

The pain is always Hannibal. 

Hannibal swallows, and reaches out to touch a cotton bloom.  His thumb traces the petal, around and back again.  “I had hoped to ask for breakfast, if I may impose.” 

“You didn’t bring it with you?”  It’s amazing, really, how quick it comes back, the sharp edge to his tongue, the little burst of triumph when he feels the bleed of Hannibal’s surprise. 

“No.  I have nothing with me you don’t see before you.”  He spreads his arms, wide, and Will considers.  It’s not honest, of course, because there’s a bike somewhere, and there’s probably three weapons at least concealed in his jacket, but the _spirit_ of the statement is….well.

To be determined, at the very least, but Will knows the taste and scent of truth. 

He breathes deep, to catch them again. 

Will crouches down, shuffles through the plants and finds what he’s looking for mostly by feel.  The pale pink of the smaller flowers is hard to see in the low light, but he spent the first 18 years of his life picking cotton.  He knows how to find a tender, new boll tucked right up under the pink blossoms, knows how sweet it tastes on the tongue and how satisfying it is for a hungry little boy hours past breakfast, hours to go till lunch.  Momma always warned him he’d get sick, but he only took a little, and he never did.

Will breaks it off in his fingers.  “Have you ever eaten a cotton boll before it’s ripe?” 

Hannibal shakes he head, just once.  His eyes are full of questions, as numerous as the stars, as luminous when Will stands up, and moves closer. 

“Here.  It’s sweet; it’ll tide you over until we make something.”  He hears the change in his own accent, in this place.  A little deeper, bittersweet. 

Hannibal doesn’t take it, not with his fingers, but his hand catches Will’s wrist and pulls it forward, and he eats the boll like that—carefully taken from beloved fingertips with a soft brush of teeth, a curl of tongue, and lingering lips.  He holds it in his mouth before he swallows, eyes closed like he’s savoring.  The boll or Will’s skin, Will’s not—

No.  No, he’s sure.  The answer is both, and it’s an answer that might apply elsewhere as well, if he let it.  He was waiting, and he wasn’t.  He does, and doesn’t know why he planted the cotton, why he came here, why he didn’t walk out the door in Wolf Trap holding onto the hand that delivered him from death, the hand that had in the past stopped just short of delivering him unto it. 

Will tugs his hand free, and rakes his fingers through Hannibal’s hair.  It isn’t clean.  His eyes are wet when they open, full of hope, and something that feels as fragile as the lattice of ice that comes before a hard frost. 

Will’s grip tightens.  “Come on, Hannibal.” 

His throat jumps at the sound of his name, like a dog called forward. 

“Let’s go in the house.”   


End file.
